I ate cake for breakfast and took a pill.
I was expecting focus, pressure, maybe a jolt of motivation.
Instead, my mind went quiet. Not peaceful, not numb. Just… quiet, like someone lowered the volume in a room I had never realised was loud.
I lay in bed for hours, scrolling through Instagram, waiting for the familiar rush to kick in. The panic that wakes my body before I am ready. The need to push myself into productivity. The guilt. The fight. None of it came. My body felt heavy, not with laziness or avoidance, but with a kind of tired I have never been allowed to feel.
At some point I forced myself up to make a chicken wrap. I expected the usual bargaining in my head, the endless negotiations to do a simple task. Instead, I got up without the war. I danced to three songs after eating. My movements felt different, slower, like I was on the coast instead of the city. I still hit Megastar. I was not performing. I was just there.
Then the quiet started to hurt.
I have spent years overriding myself to look reliable, motivated, intelligent, disciplined. I did not get to collapse or be late or forget or take breaks. I hit deadlines and showed up on time and carried weight that nobody thought was heavy because I never showed the shaking. I forced consistency even when my body was shutting down. And when I finally crashed, I still believed I had failed.
Today, something inside me loosened. Not all of it. Half of it. I felt how hard I have been working just to exist. I cried at the doctor yesterday and stopped myself before I could feel it properly. I cried again today, not loud, not dramatic. Just enough to realise that I have never known my own voice without effort.
There are people who are kind to me in ways that matter. People who listen past my flat affect and do not need my mask to understand me. My cousin sees me without needing a performance. She sees the need before the explanation. She hears me even when I speak softly.
But the people who loved my clarity, my intelligence, my reliability, the ones who admired how I pushed through everything, they are still waiting for the old version of me. The one who worked without rest. The one who made life easier for everyone else. The one who did not slow down or need anything. They do not fight for me. They fight to keep access to who I was before I stopped burning.
Today, I put half the weight down. I do not know how long this quiet will last, or whether I will find the other half. I only know this:
Some people only know how to love me when I am burning.